Serving humanity for over fifty years

As cable companies come, Dish Network is the best of the bunch. Sadly, it’s time for me to leave them.

I’ve been a Dish customer for about twenty two years. When we first moved into the house, I assesed our options and ruled out both Comcast (maybe it was Road Runner back then) and Direct TV as being way too expensive. Dish on the other hand, seemed reasonably priced and had attractive packages so they became the provider of choice.

It’s been a good relationship, but in recent years it seemed like the price just kept going up and up. To deal with it, every time there was a price increase, I would cut back programming a bit to keep the price within reason. Last year, I cut back big time and had only the locals, a few cable channels and HBO. Even with that, it was costing me almost $75 a month.

In Friday’s mail, I received this notice from Dish:

“Starting with your next bill, you will see two changes that will result in a $5 monthly increase. The first change is a $3 increase on your core programming package. The second is a $2 increase on your local channels package”

Eighty a month for minimal programming. It was time for me to leave.

Most of the time we spent on Dish was watching the locals and HBO. I could get HBO through Amazon for $15 a month and I had already installed an outside antenna this summer so I had the locals covered. The only thing missing was the ability to timeshift.

After some research, I came across the TiVo Roamio OTA. The nice thing about the Roamio OTA is that the price includes a perpetual TiVo subscription. All of their other units require sending them $15 a month to access the program guide which was not going to happen. At $399 it wasn’t cheap, but I calculated that it would pay for itself in six months time. So I headed off to Best Buy, purchased the unit, did the installation and cancelled my Dish subscription.

So far the TiVo is looking good. It can record up to four streams simultaneously and is pretty easy to use. Picture quality is excellent.

I really don’t understand what is in the heads of the executives at Dish. By all accounts they are losing subscribers at a really fast pace. You would think they would do their best to keep the loyal customers that are still with them. Even if their costs have gone up, it seems to me that it makes more sense to make a bit less profit from current customers than to raise your prices and lose them. I’m sure the accountants ran the numbers and thought this was the best solution, but reality might come back and bite them big time. Anyway, I’ve moved on. It’s been fun, but I can tell when I’m not wanted.

(The photo at the top of the page is my dish installation. I installed it myself on top of a post that once held a large satellite dish. The cables run underground about a hundred feet and then enter the house. It was done this way because my wife didn’t want an unsightly satellite dish on the side of the house. Excuse the background. It’s winter here and things aren’t looking there best.)

I was listening to a progressive rock sampler on Amazon Prime music the other day and to my surprise my ears were treated to the dulcet styling of William Shatner. William Shatner doing prog rock? Who knew it. Turns out in 2013 Shatner and Billy Sherwood release a whole prog rock album called “Ponder The Mystery.” As expected, Shatner speaks his way through it, but the music is actually pretty decent.

If you’re interested in science or have a child that is, these are well worth picking up. They are well written and fun to read and experiment with.

Sadly, Bob died Saturday night. He had been in the hospital since early November with what first appeared to be just a bad lung infection. It turns out what was thought to be a lung infection was actually heart failure. They performed bypass surgery on him which seemed to go well, but they never seemed to be able to get a handle on the lung problem. Things seemed to be looking a little better recently, but then his wife received a call on Saturday that Bob had passed away.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure to read and be educated by a lot of smart people on the Internet. Bob was one of them. He will be missed.

I was sad to see that Rose Marie, best known for playing Sally Rogers on the Dick Van Dyke show, died yesterday. That said, 94 is a pretty good run.

I’ve included a link to a video of Rose Marie when she was known as Baby Rose Marie. The video is from 1929 and I find it astounding how it feels like it’s from ancient times. It’s amazing that one person could live in a world where so much has changed in their life time.

You would think with all that global warming they keep talking about it would be a little warmer around here. At 7 AM this morning, it’s minus two degrees Fahrenheit. It seems like it should be a bit warmer for December 28th. Anytime I bring this sort of thing up with a ‘believer’, they tell me ‘that’s weather, not climate.’ Maybe, but we seem to be getting an awful lot of cold weather and snow these past couple of years and at some point I would think that it becomes climate.

I also don’t understand why I should trust predictions for fifty years in the future when they can’t accurately predict what the weather is going to be two or three days from now. Yup, I know, ‘weather not climate.’

Climate change science is based on a number of models that seem to fail again and again when put under test. Add to this all the information that has been released about the deceitful practices of a lot of big name climate scientists and it’s hard to take them seriously. (I won’t even mention Al Gore flying around the world on expensive private jets, preaching to the rubes about how they have to downsize and conserve to save the world.)

I guess it comes down to, do you trust your own two eyes and common sense or the word of people that are in line to make lots of money off of their apocalyptic predictions. Luckily, most people seem to have chosen the former.

When I was growing up, my family collected boxes from all the high end stores. Every time they’d buy something in Jordan Marsh, Remick’s, Gilcrest’s or any other perceived highfalutin store, they would ask for a box or sometimes two. Come Christmas time they would have a collection of boxes from these places and the gifts that they bought from Kresge’s, Woolworths or Zayre’s would get wrapped up nicely in those boxes (always with tissue paper) and given to friends and relatives.

It wasn’t that we were cheap bastards, we were just poor bastards.

When the person receiving our gift unwrapped it, they would always ooh and ahh over the box and how special it was that we got them something from that store.

I don’t think they were fooled. In fact, most of the gifts we received were also in boxes from all the best stores. Since most of our friends and relatives were also poor people, I’ll bet they were engaging in the same deceit that my family did.

If Jordan Marsh made a business out of just selling their boxes, they’d probably still be in business.

The above graphic was a headline in an article published on the New York Times website today. Note the subheading:

“One man is building a house so enormous, and so absurdly lavish, that it may be the ultimate symbol of our age of thirst, excess and inequality.”

They couldn’t focus on the architectural achievement, or the number of people that will be employed building this house and maintaining it after it’s built. Instead they had to go for the class envy angle.

To the leftist crazies it’s always about jealousy; if someone has more that someone else it’s just not fair. They don’t care if the person that has more, has more because they’ve worked harder, took bigger risks or were more careful about they way that they handled their money. They feel the money should be redistributed and given to those that don’t have it. Most of the time the people that are preaching this, live in expensive houses, have expensive cars and live a life style far nicer than the vast majority of the country. Sadly, they seem unable to see their hypocrisy.

There was an article in the Boston Herald yesterday about the new tax cut, which it turns out will give just about everyone a tax break. Of course in the comments, some leftist shrew was going on and on about how unfair it was that the rich were getting more money back than the poor. It didn’t matter to her that the rich were already paying three times as much on every dollar that they earned than the poor. Nope. She was just filled with hate and revulsion for anyone that had more than what she believed was their fair share. Maybe she should spend more time working and earning more than just stewing in her jealousy.

The leftist elites play a dangerous game with their class envy thing. If you get enough people to believe this garbage, we could end up like Venezuela where a once wealthy county has recently introduced a ‘Rabbit Plan’, that encourages people to eat their pet rabbits as a way to work around the food shortage created by their socialist policies.

Capitalism may not be fair, but it works and gives the majority of people the best chance of living a decent life. Socialism on the other hand is great if you want to create a lot of people that are poor but equal.

Living in New England, we have a problem with low humidity in the winter. The cold dry air of winter does a job on your skin and nasal passages and generally makes for an unpleasant time. To combat this, a number of years ago we bought a humidifier from Sears.

It’s a pretty simple device, you fill the tank with water which pools on the bottom of the humidifier and a strong fan evaporates the water, sucking it through a filter dispersing it around the house. Outside of being a little on the noisy side when it’s running full bore, it does a pretty good job of improving the air quality.

Little maintenance is required to keep it running; an occasional cleaning and the replacement of an $18 dollar filter is all that is needed.

Yesterday, we decided it was time to replace the filter. My wife going out already so I gave her the part number and asked her to stop at Sears along the way to pick one up. When she returned, she reported that they had none in stock. No big deal, we’d just try another Sears. I jumped on the Internet to see if one of the other local stores had one. No dice. In fact, their website reported that no stores within fifty miles carried them so we decided to order one online instead.

Nope. Sears had none in stock, but luckily Amazon did.

How can this be? It’s a Sears humidifier, Sears filter, and yet I was only able to get a replacement from their competition.

This is crazy. The executives as Sears should be ashamed at collecting a pay check. These filters are low cost items that probably have a pretty big margin, they are widely used and a guaranteed sale during the winter months. How can they not have these available in their stores?

It will be sad the day that Sears finally goes out of business, but it won’t be unexpected. They have had opportunity after opportunity to compete, but their incompetent management seems hell bent on sinking the company. It’s a sad thing.

About Me

Al

I'm not dead yet. I'm an old guy conservative guy interested in just about everything. What you'll find on these pages is an eclectic mix of anything I feel like talking about. Most of it will be benign, but I'm sure some of it will offend someone.
Enter at your own risk.